


Just Around the Corner

by Crownofpins



Series: Baba [4]
Category: Castlevania (Cartoon), 悪魔城ドラキュラ | Castlevania Series
Genre: Angst, Multi, Trevor gets sick, alucard makes weird noises, but not like, everything is sad, sad angst, sypha is an aggressive braider, uh what does that even mean
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-02
Updated: 2018-08-02
Packaged: 2019-06-20 10:46:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,216
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15532560
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Crownofpins/pseuds/Crownofpins
Summary: "Alucard is whittling, sorrow heavy on his brow like a crown of thorns, grief dripping down his form like blood drawn. He barely looks at his hands, but still the shape of a wolf, curled and round, takes form with each strike. Sypha is staring dreamily into their fire, her eyes bright in the darkness, making the fire leap and then fall, leap and then fall."The aftermath of even the noblest deed has its repercussions.Written prior to S2.





	Just Around the Corner

* * *

They’re halfway to the capital, heralding their own victory to each village they pass through, when Trevor falls ill.

It seems kind of stupid, this far into it, so fresh from the final fight that Trevor swears he still has Dracula’s blood under his fingernails (and like hell will he touch Alucard with that hand, not until he’s scrubbed and washed raw and pink and clean). Stupid is kind of a theme in his life, though, and so with that in mind Trevor finds himself fussily turning back and forth on a pile of hay in a dead village, debating if he should say something about the ache growing out from his muscles to his skin and the rough pain collecting in his throat.

Alucard is whittling, sorrow heavy on his brow like a crown of thorns, grief dripping down his form like blood drawn. He barely looks at his hands, but still the shape of a wolf, curled and round, takes form with each strike. Sypha is staring dreamily into their fire, her eyes bright in the darkness, making the fire leap and then fall, leap and then fall. She’s spelling shapes into the fire, wild animals leaping and twisting and monsters with jaws flying askew. A few times he thinks he sees what might well be the flex of a body, maybe his if he’s flattering himself. Trevor suspects she’s practicing her story to pass on to her people. It’s beautiful, and it makes him unwilling to break the peace.

His body does it for him, though: unwittingly, he coughs. His breath raises steam, but suddenly he can’t stop coughing, body pitching in on itself, his belly locking tight and his world narrowing into a dark, cold tunnel.

“Fuck me,” Trevor grates blearily when the cough subsides, wiping his eyes and unclenching from around himself slowly.

“Trevor,” Sypha says, astonished. The fire has died down to a normal campside blaze. “Are you all right?”

“Sure,” he says easily, turning on his side, away from her stare and Alucard’s apprehensive, steady assessment. “Just swallowed wrong.”

“Are you sure?” Sypha stands up and moves to come to his side, but there’s a rustle of cloth.

“Sypha,” Alucard says, gently inserting himself between her and Trevor. “Let me look at him. If he is ill, it would be best if you didn’t come into contact with him.”

“We’ve been sleeping back-to-back for ages now,” Sypha says, tipping her head. Trevor peeks over his shoulder to mean-mug at Alucard. “Trevor, don’t be a brat.”

“Even so, you aren’t ill yet, but he is,” Alucard says with studied politeness, and that’s that: Sypha goes and sits down again, wringing her hands in her robes. She hates being denied the chance to act, hates any leash that pulls her back from action. But Alucard’s hand on her elbow is a gentle ask rather than a pointing demand, and that she unceasingly bows to when all else fails. That reciprocity, ferocity to meet ferocity, gentleness when confronted with meekness, is one of the traits Trevor admires most in her.

Alucard’s examination is cursory, but Trevor figures that it doesn’t take any great doctoring to see the pallor on his skin and feel the heat on his forehead.

“Sick indeed,” Alucard says, his demeanor cool, exactly as it has been since they left the castle. Trevor doesn’t look at him directly, hasn’t been able to, not really, since they murdered his father with his help. Trevor feels no guilt for slaying Dracula, no remorse for murdering a monster that would have killed them all and with evident pleasure; he does feel shame, deep and echoing, for the fact that through circumstances out of any of their control Alucard had been the one to deal the death blow to the father he had loved.

“I’ll just sleep it off,” Trevor says, pulling his cloak around him more tightly against the cold of winter. They’re tucked in a barn, because that’s the least bloody part of the place. After they left the Belmont lands, the snow had come again and stayed, and tonight is no exception: their own tracks inside are already buried at the entry.

“You’re going to have to,” Alucard says, still looming over Trevor. “There isn’t anything I can use to make any medicine here. Sypha, I think you should sleep apart as well. I don’t want you to fall ill.”

“I suppose,” she grumbles, starting to play with the fire again. “I wish I had some herbs left over.”

Trevor grunts and pulls his cloak over his head. That’s fine. He’ll probably be better by morning.

 

 

 

In the morning, gray and dark, he is in fact worse than before. He needs help to stand and take a piss outside, and it doesn’t escape his notice that Alucard supports him on the walk like he’s fouled in some way. To be fair, Trevor reminds himself, tucking his dick back in his pants and shivering despite how all-body-hot he feels, he probably is pretty grimy by now. He’s not had a bath in a long time, and a long one with nice soap in even longer.

Still, it’s hard not to notice that Alucard handles him down to the ground in only the most cursory of fashions and returns quickly to Sypha’s side to rouse her. Trevor considers griping, but he can’t muster the energy, so he lies in stillness on the pile of hay that’s now, apparently, his sole and solitary island in a sea of unsaid words.

“I’m going out,” Alucard announces, rolling his shoulders as he walks to the doorway of the barn. The doors are shattered, but they form a barrier against the storm that’s good enough. Sypha had frozen some ice over the cracks to keep out the wind, and the effect of the weak sunlight coming through is creepy at best. “Sypha, if you can, please prepare some hot water in a pot of any kind. I’m going to try to catch some rabbits.”

And then he’s gone.

Sypha mumbles sleepily, smacking her lips. Trevor pops his head up to watch her and is rewarded with one of his favorite sights: her head, curly and mussed, poking up out of her robes, and her eyes laden with that particular sleep-softness that makes anybody look gentler, sweeter. He smiles at her. She smiles back after a moment, yawning hugely and stretching out one arm, then they next.

“It’s colder without your cloak,” she sighs, rolling her shoulders.

“Yeah,” Trevor agrees tiredly, not really bothering to make conversation so much as agree with her, talk to her, interact with her in some way now that he can’t touch her. But words, never exactly his strong suit, come harder than expected. His throat is jagged and it hurts to talk like he’s working around a burning iron in his windpipe. He’s painfully thirsty. He’s also keenly aware that, since the whole Baba Yaga thing, they three haven’t slept apart. Even now, with Alucard’s silence festering between them, they all still sleep shoulder-to-shoulder. Or, did. Not the past night. Another pace between Alucard and him, he thinks, another step away. Worry gnaws in his belly, and in tandem with the fever-ache it makes his heart beat like he’s in battle.

Trevor fusses a little with the straw at his fingers, leaning his head back to settle under his cloak again. He figures Alucard knows what’s what about sickness and disease, and hell if Trevor does. But he still wishes that, if just for a moment, he could have a cool washcloth on his forehead, and a hand in his, and the dip of a bed with a warm voice calling his name.

“Trevor,” Sypha says, urgently, from behind Alucard, as if his illness is some monster that can be defended against. “Trevor, how are you doing?”

“Fine,” he replies, confused, unburying himself from his cloak-and-hay nest. Didn’t Alucard just leave? What’s Sypha so worked up about? Wasn’t she just over there?

“He needs a better environment than this,” Alucard growls, slashing a look to the door of the barn as if it has done him some deeply personal wrong.

Confusingly, it’s almost dark out again. Trevor frowns at the door, uncomprehending, but then he doubles over in a cough that leads him back into that darkness, and the tunnel presses closer this time.

Then Alucard is over him, spooning a meagre broth into his mouth, and Sypha appears at his feet in the dark, warding off some of the chill there, and suddenly he’s outside puking with Alucard holding him up and Sypha’s worried voice calling from the barn, and then it’s black black black all the way down.

 

 

 

Trevor comes to with the keen awareness, honed through years and handed down through generations of monster hunting, that he is being watched. Laboriously, agonizingly, he turns, breaking a sweat to do it, and comes face-to-face with Alucard.

The urge seizes him like a wolf’s jaws: to bury himself in his chest, to claw and scratch and bite until he’s buried in the other man’s flesh, in his ribs, in his bones and his heart and his soul, until he’s bound up so deeply that Alucard can never think of pulling away again, can never get rid of him, can never discard him, not even after he’s served as the imperfect tool that he is. The urge hits so abruptly that it knocks the breath out of him. Anger crests that wave, too, a strange self-righteous possessive fury riding him at Alucard’s resentment of Trevor, as if Alucard himself hadn’t recruited both of them expressly and singly to kill Dracula. As if Trevor was anything but a man born and bred to kill monsters, borne of a line of endlessly the same.

Alucard is watching him silently, his eyes roving over Trevor’s features as Trevor goes one way and then the other inside himself. It feels like a physical struggle, like a fight he’s going to lose either way, like a victory he was never promised.

“Ah,” says Alucard, beautiful as a venomous thing in the night, and crouched just so over Trevor like one too, “you’re awake again.”

“You’re leaving,” Trevor says, his tone furious, betrayed. He’s shaking, and he can’t tell if it’s from his anger or from his illness.

Alucard freezes.

“You _bastard_ ,” Trevor hisses, a weak hand creeping up, quaking, to grab at Alucard’s shoulder. “You promised me. You _promised_ me.” He drags himself up using Alucard’s body, ignores his pleas for Trevor to rest, to sleep, to calm down, and he shakes him as hard as he can. “ _You promised me_.”

“What’s going on?” Sypha asks, muzzily, rising up on her elbows at the same time the fire springs to life.

“His fever has broken,” Alucard says, at the same time that Trevor cracks out in his blood-broken voice,

“He’s running away from us,” and Sypha says, squinting,

“Why are you wearing your sword?”

 

 

 

The fight is short but spectacular: Sypha catches Alucard’s heels in ice and seals the door shut with vicious spikes, burns his blurred edges in flame and herds him to them again mercilessly, and Trevor catches him with his whip and reels him in the rest of the way.

Trevor is coughing and sweating and trembling like he’s just been born wet into this iron-cold earth. Belmont stamina, he forces himself to think, and fights against the taste of blood roaring so close to the surface of his tongue that he can taste it without tasting it. He strikes out one last time, teeth bared, vision going red at the edges with the pounding of his heart, watches the whip release and coil.

Alucard is brought low like a struggling animal, his teeth bared and his arms bound tight to his body by the impenetrable braiding of the Vampire Killer. Trevor sees, with no small pride, that he’s managed to get it just right: nowhere the whip touches is skin, and so nowhere have bloodied wheals raised. The flames on the whip remain dormant too, and that Trevor chalks up to Alucard’s human heritage.

The helpless, sorrow-filled cry he lets out can probably be attributed to that as well.

“Please,” he begs, hanging his head, letting his hair hide him. “Please, let me go. I cannot. I cannot.”

Sypha tightens her jaw and casts her eyes on the mess of icy spikes on the barn door, the small fires she’s set in the act of keeping Alucard from fleeing. The ice thickens into walls thick as stone and the flames die entirely. Trevor falls to his knees, coughing, but the black tunnel doesn’t come for him this time, and he’s grateful. It seems he has, indeed, turned the corner.

“How could you just,” Trevor asks, settling for crawling when walking seems out of his reach, “were you just going to, to leave? Now that we’d done the hard bit, were you going to,” he stops to cough, and to his relief, his intense bodily relief, he feels Sypha’s hand smooth across his brow, her other hand gentle on his shoulder as she holds him up and supports him against the strength of her legs.

“Explain yourself,” Sypha demands, queenly. She radiates a cold fury that Trevor isn’t sure he’s ever truly experienced from her before. The chill, even in the frozen barn, is palpable.

But silence falls. The only sound is of Alucard, his face tucked to the filthy floor to hide the ugliness of his tears.

 

 

 

Sypha and Trevor, still distrustful of Alucard’s intentions, keep him bound up in the Vampire Killer. They cluster around him, Sypha against his back and facing the door, Trevor with his leg pressed against his own bound ones.

He hasn’t stopped weeping, has only started to make terrible animal cries of suffering, wolf-howls and groaning gutteral moans like a hurt cat and bird-screeches sharp in agony and nothing, nothing at all like a man’s grief at all. It makes Trevor’s heart ache, but he also knows, from unpleasantly firsthand experience, that nothing can be done at all. The only thing to do is wait, and waiting is the most torturous part of it.

 

 

 

“I thought,” Alucard says, his eyes red but in the white bits only, a contrast to the usual way his eyes turn red, “that I might… spare you, my… my lamentations.”

Trevor still hasn’t unwrapped him, perhaps out of spite, perhaps out of fear that he’ll make a run for it still. He has the unpleasant knowledge that a second round of ‘capture Alucard’ won’t go so well—skilled as they are, they really only succeeded because Alucard had absolutely no frame of reference for them turning on him. They won by surprise, really.

Sypha, her fingers knotted in Alucard’s hair and braiding it aggressively, shakes her head and tugs at his scalp a little. Her face is screwed down in a furious frown. She’s got him sitting, is leaning over him and tying him down in any little way she can, even if it’s just his hair to itself.

“So what, you just decided to leave with Trevor ill and I the only one here to help him? Irresponsible!”

“I thought that you might be kept busy helping Trevor to recover,” Alucard says, miserable, avoiding not just Trevor’s eyes now but Sypha’s too, “and then there would be the victory to celebrate, and so I would fade easily enough from memory.”

Sypha’s expression crumples violently, as Trevor expected it to, into tears. She keeps braiding though, and simply cries silently over his hair. Her tears drip miserably down her chin, but she keeps silent. Still, it’s clear that Alucard can tell she’s crying—he looks down at his knees, shame burning clear as a star in the night sky.

Trevor heaves a sigh. Standing next to Alucard with his hand still on Vampire Killer, it occurs to him that Alucard’s unwillingness to engage with Trevor may well have been the opposite of his interpretation. In fact, it may well have been that Alucard was the one who viewed himself as soiled, and so wished to besmirch Trevor as little as possible. Though the thought is truly, deeply absurd from Trevor’s own point of view, if he flips into Alucard’s shoes, he starts to see the feel of it, if not the fact of it.

Patricide, he considers, is made no less difficult by more dire alternatives.

“Trevor,” Alucard says, sweetly, meekly, his mouth fixed down and his brow tilted up beseechingly, “can you let me go? I promise I won’t—“

“Just like you promised me you’d come back to make a home with Sypha and I,” he says roughly, blood pounding through him still, rocking him back and forth like a hand is moving him. He feels hot and miserable again. “No. You stay there, just like that.”

Sypha makes an approving noise.

“I didn’t want,” Alucard says, then pauses to take a deep, shuddering breath. “I didn’t want you to be saddled with my… with me. I am…. I cannot fault the people of this country for celebrating my father’s death. But I cannot… join.”

“I don’t know if you noticed,” Trevor says, watching Sypha’s nimble fingers braid in a pattern he’s never seen before, “but I’m not about to have a big celebration with the people that murdered my entire family and cast me out in my travelling cloak. They can have a big old party, with lots of drinking and sinning and fucking,” he huffs and finally, finally eases himself down onto the ground, “but I’m headed back to my home. I have a life to start. So does the rest of the country, if they’re smart.” He coughs again, curling in hard on himself, but again the black tunnel stays at bay, and again he’s grateful.

“Please rest, Trevor,” says Sypha, trying to soften a little around her anger and fear. She’s largely unsuccessful. Her tears are slowing down, though, and, not coincidentally, the fire has calmed as well. “You’re still not well.”

“It sure would have been nice to just be able to rest,” he complains, voice gone torn and tatty with the violence of his cough, “instead of having to worry about some _asshole_ deciding to ditch us once he’d gotten what he wanted and was done with us.” He does sit, though. His legs are shaking.

“No,” Alucard protests, looking over at Trevor sharply. He’s still laid out, long and lithe like a serpent, on the floor before them. Sypha is picking hay out of his hair as she moves away from the crown of his head.

“Is that what that was, by the way?” Trevor trembles with anger, betrayal simmering in him, lighting him up from the inside with wild-shy hurt. Something in this has prodded an old wound left rotten in him, and the ache is too poisonous, too close to that long-held knowledge of himself as an efficient tool, a firstborn son, a Belmont first, and a person with foibles and desires second. “Did you just tell me that you wanted to come back and make a home because you thought that was what I wanted to hear? Did you just tell me that so that I would continue on to the castle, get the job done?”

“I would never,” Alucard says, his eyes wide in shock. He physically recoils as much as he can under the circumstances.

“Funny that you say that,” Trevor seethes, and wishes badly that he had a bottle full of something nasty to curl up and drown this ugly part of him inside of, “because that sure seems like what happened here. I’m good enough to fuck with and good enough to kill with, but I’m sure as hell not good enough to settle down with, is that it?”

Sypha leans down and kisses Trevor’s face right at where the sharp line of his cheekbone meets his cheek. She lets him turn away, doesn’t force him to come back to her, and for that he’s grateful, grateful, grateful. He loves her so powerfully in that moment that he feels a residual echo, sees a memory through eyes his own but foreign yet, of swooping down smoothly into her arms from a great height. He doesn’t know what to make of that, and so discards it, keeping only the impression: of love, of ferocious crushing hungry love.

 “Trevor,” Alucard says, and this time his voice is trembling like the strings of a cello under a skilled player’s hand. “Please, untie me.”

“Fuck you,” he says.

“I want to hold you,” he begs, and it’s Sypha that reaches down and brushes off the whip like it’s a naughty dog. “Thank you, Sypha,” Alucard says, obviously chastened.

Trevor gathers it up in neat coils, spitefully turning his back on Alucard.

“You think,” Trevor says, and tries not to pay attention to the hand on his shoulder, the way Alucard plays with a lock grown long at the base of his neck, “that we’d just leave you out in the cold, to suffer in the dark alone?”

Alucard’s finger falls still.

“Trevor’s right,” Sypha says. She’s pulling less on Alucard’s hair now, smoothing more. Trevor isn’t looking at them, but he can hear it in her voice, can see it in Alucard’s body from the corner of his eye. “We love you. The idea of you leaving, never to return, just so that your grief wouldn’t disturb us, is….” She takes in a sharp breath. “Can you imagine for me, Alucard, how painful that is? Don’t you trust us to take care of you? To treat you with tenderness? To carry you when you are exhausted, as you have us?”

Alucard covers his face with his hands. Trevor knows this because he turns to look at him at Sypha’s words.

“You didn’t let me slump around in misery,” he picks up. “You two are my… look. When I went out, remember? At Baba Yaga’s place?” Alucard nods, his face still hidden. Above him, Trevor can see Sypha tip her head in interest. Out of some mutual agreement, they don’t speak much of that experience; Trevor suspects that the gauntlet of Dracula’s castle will fall into that same basket.

“All I could think of was… you two. Every time I came back, all I could think of was you two, of the things you’d taught me, shared with me. I was… I went to some places where… I could have been lost, forever, I think.” Trevor thinks of those endless dark waters he’d come across, the sublime and impossible way they stretched out unceasingly under him, and of how easy it would have been to walk over that perfect silver rim. The endless snow and the lines of mysterious lights. The infinite freedom of the sky, of abandoning his human skin to ride the sun on the wind. “The only thing that pulled me back was you two. Time and time again, it was only you. _Both_ of you. So just….”

Trevor rakes his hands through his hair, staring into the fire. Sypha, riveted, has stopped braiding.

“Let me reel you back in sometimes, okay? Let us both pull you back.” He turns and looks at Alucard plain in the face.

He looks terrible. His eyes are reddened and his face is blotchy with tears, and his fangs are out and ridiculous alongside the fine lines of his face, and he’s got a stuffed-up nose and a desperately sad, desperately needy expression, made stark and terrible by the deep red-blood color of his eyes. He looks sloppy and unrefined and exactly like a boy who’s just lost his parents in tragic circumstances in close succession to each other far too young.

Finally giving in to that clawing hunger, Trevor scoots in close and lets Alucard grab on to him, lets him bury his wet face in his shoulder and tangle his fingers in his hair. Sypha embraces Alucard from the other side, and Trevor can feel her hands spread out to grab and squeeze at Trevor’s shoulders too.

He melts into the contact, feels the tension in him ease. It’s a physical sensation, the easing of that knot, and he relishes the warmth, the tightness of the hold he’s locked in, and even the ugly, foreign animal cries Alucard starts to let out again, sounds no human throat could make, not really. Sypha starts to rock them all, shushing Alucard quietly, starts to hum. In that moment, bundled up in the blistering ache of love and affection and fear for the one you love, Trevor starts to understand, just a little, the staggering bravery it must have taken Sypha and Alucard to reach out to him like this, the breathtaking pain they had risked to pull him to them from such a dark, dark chasm.

“I’m here,” Trevor says, his arms locking more tightly around Alucard. “I’ve got you.”

“Me too,” Sypha says, kissing his half-braided hair, his face, anything she can reach. “You’re caught. We have you too tightly. It’s too late.”

Alucard rocks with them, and eventually, eventually, his sobs subside to the cries of a wounded son only.

* * *

 

**Author's Note:**

> Oh man who loves Alucard dealing with the absolutely fresh bleeding guilt of baby's first patricide?
> 
> um
> 
> stay hydrated, love and kisses, this is within the Baba mythos but like, probably slots in reasonably well otherwise, assuming you're into the OT3
> 
> come whisper secrets to me on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/crownofpins) or [Pillowfort](https://www.pillowfort.io/Crownofpins)


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